James Beard Awards: Maricel Presilla on winning best chef Mid-Atlantic for Hoboken's Cucharamama

ARISTIDE ECONOMOPOULOS/THE STAR-LEDGERMaricel Presilla in the dining room of her Hoboken restaurant, Cucharamama, which is a showcase for pan-Latin cooking, although the menu today skews toward the flavors of Ecuador, where she has traveled recently.

When Presilla, the chef-owner of Hoboken's Cucharamama, finally won Monday night, she discovered that victory has its downside. After quickly downing Champagne and a few bites of foie gras and Serrano ham, she was so overwhelmed by well-wishers that she couldn't get anywhere near the gourmet eats at the black-tie gala, called the Oscars of the food world.

Same deal at the packed after-party at New York's 11 Madison Park, whose chef Daniel Humm was named best in the country. Starving, she and her business partner, Clara Chaumont, swung by hotspot Pastis in the Meatpacking District. Closed.

At 2:30 a.m., the newly-minted best chef found herself tucking into pancakes and omelettes at that 24-hour temple of gastronomy known as Hoboken’s Malibu Diner. Now that she thinks about it, Presilla says it’s only fitting — the diner was where she and Chaumont often huddled when their first restaurant, Zafra, also in Hoboken, was getting off the ground 12 years ago.

“We might be in New Jersey, but we are very ambitious,” she says of Cucharamama, the eatery for which she earned the award, in a mile-a-minute conversation yesterday morning from her home in Weehawken.

“Things are done the hard way. We have an artisanal way of cooking that is sophisticated yet time-consuming. It’s a very beautiful, complex place,” she says. “I feel that people finally understand, ‘Okay, this is great food.’”

Her win also signals that another barrier has been broken — people with empty stomachs are willing to cross the Hudson.

Each year, Presilla has competed against larger restaurants with deeper-pocketed investors, in cities flush with four-star eateries. The mid-Atlantic category pits chefs in New Jersey against those in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, and has been thoroughly dominated by D.C. and Philly chefs. This is the first time a chef from New Jersey has won the award since 2000, when Craig Shelton, then of the Ryland Inn, was honored.

After an open online call for nominations, the nominees are whittled down, and a large panel of judges — previous winners, restaurant critics and food writers, culinary educators and James Beard Foundation members — choose the winners.

Presilla, whose family fled Cuba in 1970, studied medieval Spanish history at New York University and taught at Rutgers University, but she also fell under the spell of Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, the groundbreaking Peruvian chef credited with introducing tapas to the United States at his New York restaurant Ballroom.

In 2000, Presilla and Chaumont opened Zafra, the casual but supremely authentic Cuban eatery in Hoboken. In 2004, they debuted Cucharamama, which means “mother spoon.” The intimate, atmospheric bistro showcases pan-Latin cuisine and is heavily influenced by Presilla’s travels.

The peanut-potato tamales are not merely Colombian in style, but specific to the Valle del Cauca region. The marinated skewered shrimp comes with the corn and queso blanco relish Presilla encountered in Arequipa, Peru. The adobe oven, open to the dining room, fires Argentinian sausages, several varieties of empanadas and, with advance notice, whole suckling pig, and the cement bar is colored the same shade of blue Presilla saw in Venezuelan kitchens.

Presilla, the first Latina to win the mid-Atlantic award and the second woman to do so, dedicated her medal to the memory of Rojas-Lombardi, who had been James Beard’s longtime assistant. She told the crowd that she was proud to raise the profile of Latinos in the restaurant world: “The cooks of this country are Latinos. It is absolutely possible to get this prize, and it is absolutely fantastic.”

Presilla has an encyclopedic cookbook called "Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America" (W.W. Norton, $45) coming out later this year, and she and Chaumont opened a Latin, Spanish and Portuguese food import store, Ultramarinos, in Hoboken in 2010, but she has no firm plans to expand beyond her current empire.

“I want to go to Cucharamama right away,” she says. “I just want to start working again and making it even better.”